Has New Zealand become a cult?

This post was written with my tongue in my cheek… kind of.

I was pondering the traits of a cult the other day, and it suddenly dawned on me that New Zealand has, rather worryingly, started ticking a lot of the boxes in recent weeks.

Cults typically entail the following characteristics:

A charismatic leader whose words and oratory prowess gives rise to a powerful cult of personality.

The group always comes before the individual - to the point that the individual ceases to have any meaningful control over their own life. This is usually enforced using powerful psychological cues, like constantly referring to the group as your new family or central focus.

There are usually cult-specific liturgies and rituals, often associated with cleansing, that initiate and unite the cult members. These also serve to seperate the clean from the unclean, and imbue a powerful sense of superiority in those who adhere to them.

The whereabouts of cult members must be accounted for at almost all times, and certain types of associations are prohibited. It is also common for cult leaders to expect group members to report any violations of the leader’s edicts.

Cult leaders maintain control by constantly warning about great calamities that will befall those who fail to heed their message.

Cults are bound together by the existence of disproportionate fears amongst the members, who believe that unquestioning allegiance to the edicts of the leader is their only path to salvation.

Cults commonly seperate members from important and intimate contact with their own family and friends, claiming that such contact is risky or harmful to the wellbeing of the group or the individual.

The leader will maintain control via daily interaction with cult members. This usually involves appearing on a stage to deliver a special message to all of the members at once. This can be accompanied by a time of questions, with the most devoted adherents receiving praise for their questions. Those who ask more probing questions either receive disdain from the cult leader, or they are responded to with condescension to make them appear ignorant.

Those who raise questions about the conduct of the leader or the edicts they are issuing will be abused and chastised for being a dangerously uninformed threat to the safety of the group. This abuse usually comes from other members of the cult. 

The leader will often have a second-in-command. This person will be popular with the group, but they are never as charismatic or as beloved as the leader. While it would not be unusual for the leader to address the group alone, it would be rare for the second-in-command to do this without the leader also being present.

Cult members commonly venerate their leader and even create iconography or images that are displayed in prominent places as an act of reverence to them.

A cult leader will always claim to be in possession of some special and important knowledge and as result their edicts are not allowed to be questioned by group members.

Cult members will commonly surrender their faculties of reasoning and critical thinking and instead bestow an almost divine level of infallibility on the leader to direct their lives.

The leader will often make moral demands of cult members that they do not follow themselves. For example, they might demand that the group maintain a set physical distance from each other for the sake of purity, but then they will repeatedly violate that strict moral norm themselves. The second-in-command will often behave this way as well.

Members of a cult usually don’t question obvious glaring red flags. So, if the leader was to completely change a major edict without reason, or they were to start saying things which raised serious questions about the reliability of an earlier calamitous prophecy they wouldn’t ever face major challenge.

One other important point - people who write articles like this one are sure to invoke the ire of the most devoted members of the cult.